#hanif abdurraqib

[yoggybloggy]

"...and so that Jepsen's music is not the kind of pop music that relentlessly desires a body means that desire itself is the body. Desire is the living thing at the end of the tunnel waiting with open arms and to some, I imagine this isn't a happy ending. Wanting leading into more wanting isn't exactly a neatly-tied ribbon but it is a certainty. I will wait tomorrow the desire for something I cannot have, and even if I can have it, I will chase the idea of not being able to have it until I find something else fleeting. [...] It's a discredit to Jepsen's ability to speak of the feelings she brings forth without at least imagining the idea that she knows exactly what she is doing, that she's figured out a simple math: once that you've caught that which you desire, the story is less interesting. She gives us instead a never-ending chase where the only thing to fall in love with is the idea of falling in love."

Tell a Friend That You're in Love With Them Tonight: on "Your Type", by Hanif Abdurraqib (source)

[therisingfog]

-Hanif Abdurraqib

[sparklyslug]

Hanif Abdurraqib is the poetical voice of our time, our generation, our people

[firstfullmoon]

“I have still not gotten good at explaining this to anyone who has always wanted to be alive, or at least people who have rarely questioned their commitment to living, but there is a border between wanting to be alive and wanting to stay here, wherever here is to you, or whatever it means. It’s a border that I have found to be flimsy, a thin sheet overrun with holes. But it is a border, nonetheless. Similar to the border between, say, sadness and suffering. All these feelings can intersect, of course. But I have found it slightly more confusing when they don’t. When I maybe want to be alive, but don’t want to be in the world as it is. When I haven’t wanted to be alive, but want to cling to the varied bits of brightness that tumble into my sadness, or my suffering, which isn’t the same as a temporary haze of sadness, or a rush of anxiety. I mean suffering that requires a constant measuring of the scales between staying and leaving. Suffering that requires a consideration of how long the scale can tilt toward leaving before it becomes the only viable option. There are a lot of things in any life that aren’t left up to the people doing the living. If there is anything for a suffering person (or any person) to self-determine, it should be how they live, or if they choose to live at all.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, in “The Art of Disappearance”

[kitchen-light]

the poem begins not where the knife enters but where the blade twists.

Hanif Abdurraqib, from his poem ‘The Prestige’, published at Poets.Org

[typewriter-worries]

It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

[feral-ballad]

Hanif Abdurraqib, I Was Told the Sunlight Was a Cure

[Text ID: “and still, on the days I / want / to be alive the sunlight leaves / me stunned like a kiss”]

[carfuckerlynch]

[transcript: 1. “god is fucking with my oblivion. if he wants forgiveness, he shouldn’t have given us memory.”

2. “your god comes and he is ordinary and terrible. he confers with the doctors at your kitchen table and tells you to eat….”

3. “our father who art in heaven. our father who art buried in the yard.”

4. “at the trial of god, we will ask: ‘why did you allow all this?’ and the answer will be an echo: ‘why did you allow all this?’”

5. “i don’t believe in god as much as i believe in the interrogation room. i believe in someone placing a loaded gun on a metal table between me and a door. who gets to be god then? will god be the bullet or the table or the door.”

6. “every spy knows this. some say god is where we put our sorrow. god says, which one of you fuckers can get to me first?”/end transcript.]

vi khi nao— fish in exile/leila chatti— portrait of the illness as nightmare/richard siken— snow and dirty rain/ilya kaminsky— a city like a guillotine shivers on its way to the neck/hanif abdurraqib— all the tv shows are about cops/richard siken— war of the foxes

[aridante]

Hanif Abdurraqib, And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes

[geryone]

“TELL A FRIEND THAT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH THEM TONIGHT” Instagram Post, Hanif Abdurraqib

[glowcowboy]

POEMS FROM AN EMAIL EXCHANGE by hanif abdurraqib [ID in ALT]

[mirroredroads]

on reconnecting with one's self. Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us / Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday (1991) / Anais Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1939-1947 / @sha963 / Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous / Untitled (2022), Sung Hwa Kim, soft pastels and acrylic on paper / Better in the Morning, Birdtalker / Untitled (2022), Sung Hwa Kim, soft pastels and acrylic on paper / Jenn Givhan, from “The Decision”

[solsburryhill]

“And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each other among the forest of writhing and make a deal.

Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.”

— Hanif Abdurraqib, “On Marathons and Tunnels,” in A Little Devil in America

[pirlonoir]

The Delicious Misery of the 'Sad Banger', by Hanif Abdurraqib

[firstfullmoon]

no but hanif abdurraqib wrote “and still, on the days I want to be alive the sunlight leaves me stunned like a kiss” & it rewired my brain

[orpheuslament]

Hanif Abdurraqib, from The Crown Ain't Worth Much